jgkojak wrote:The Milk and Honey tracks too are interesting (as is unreleased stuff like Real Love)- if he ever got past the half-Yoko charade (which was really just a cop-out to be held accountable for a solid all John album) he would have likely made some good music.

That wasn't a charade. If you listen to his 1980 interviews, he was adamant that people would have to accept him with Yoko.This is coming from John himself. In any cae, I like Yoko's songs on DF and I think it's a concept album that worked alot better than STINYC.

jgkojak wrote:The problem is that Lennon just started stretching a little on Walls and Bridges- POB and Imagine were great but musically (same as Paul and George's stuff at the time) logical extensions of their Beatle work.

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true. he is experimenting, playing around a lot on WAB. Going Down on Love is almost a macca-like "song-suite", and his song strucures are often unorthodox on that album. It's great!

May sweet memories of friends from the pastAlways comes to you, when you look for them

The man, like his three former bandmates, is quite simply a legend. I love his solo work (I'm even a massive fan of Sometime in NYC). Yes it is a bit hit and miss compared to The Beatles catalogue but then whose career wouldn't be when standing next to that!?! They all produced some great work away from the band but suffered from the comparisons to previous glories.

As for Lennon solo, no it wasn't a waste - Imagine, Plastic Ono Band, NYC, Double Fantasy, Rock n Roll (love swamp blues style Sweet Little 16) are all amongst the finest albums ever in my opinion. they stand up just as well as say All Things Must Past, Band on the Run, Ram, Ringo, Tug of War, Living in the Material World and the other great solo albums.

Hell I'll even stick my neck out and say even some of Yoko's stuff on DF, NYC and Milk and Honey is great (Namely: Born in a Prison , Sisters O Sister [both way ahead of their time], O Sanity and Kiss Kiss Kiss).

Outside of music he was perfectly entitled to take 5 years off - he didn't owe fans anything. I also believe his campaigning to make this world a better place was time well spent - might not always have been effective but he never forgot the issues that mattered to him and consequently kept them in the public eye.

I wonder if artists like Bjork, and others I can't think of at the moment, have been influenced by Yoko at all. I mean, there's been some pretty weird stuff produced that has gotten positive critical reviews, and Yoko seems to be the grandmother of that stuff.

I hear a lot of Yoko's influence in Bjork. I am a Bjork fan as well, and she has much confidence in the music she makes because people like Yoko paved the way. I feel that people didn't understand the art of what Yoko was doing and were critical of her, yet although I feel Yoko was a great artist more so than a musician she understood art ideals more than music ideals but fused them together even though she may haven't had much confidence in the music department other than John's confidence in her. She had enough confidence to perservere, but artists like Bjork are far more confident now in what they are doing, and also I feel that since the 1960's and some of the changes in art-rock and music in general since, it is more acceptable to be doing that more abstract sort of vocalization and being different period.

I feel like John probably needed the five-year layoff. Unlike Paul, John seemed to have a more difficult time writing about things that didn't affect him directly. Sure, he did it on some of the early Beatles stuff and other things along the way, but John really wrote from inside. When you do that, sometimes you need to take a break when you don't have anything to say. Paul has always been able to write songs just because he loves to write 'em. John needed them at times. He didn't need them for those five years and actually had seemed to break through to being able to write about being happy, too. A shame we didn't get to see what would've happened. His writing may have veered toward Paul's, just writing for the joy of it.

ahawk66 wrote:John [...] actually had seemed to break through to being able to write about being happy, too. A shame we didn't get to see what would've happened. His writing may have veered toward Paul's, just writing for the joy of it.

Good point I had always wondered what had made "Double Fantasy" so different from John's previous albums, and I suppose this must be one important aspect. There's lots of positive, even "reconciling" lyrics on it: "Beautiful Boy", "Woman" and of course "Starting Over"... Plus there's "Watching the Wheels", which in a way seems to be meant to justify his periods of "inactivity". Geez, I love "Double Fantasy", and who knows what the man still had in him

It's the start of a journeyTo a much better placeAnd this wasn't badSo a much better placeWould have to be special...